The JMICAWE team is delighted to welcome new PhD student, Lisa Qing Yang, to the team. Lisa will be doing her PhD part time in China, focusing on poultry farmers and how higher welfare standards might be implemented in China. She is keen to understand how Chinese poultry farmers perceive their current practice on farms and to develop interventions to encourage better welfare practice.
This project will be built on multidisciplinary knowledge and qualitative research methodologies. Before pursuing her PhD, Lisa obtained her master’s degrees in International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law at the University of Edinburgh, Non-profit Organisations and Civil Society Studies at the University of Kent, and Applied Linguistics at Sichuan University in China.
Lisa says: ‘I learnt the term “animal welfare” for the first time in 2010, when I joined an international animal welfare organisation as a Public Relations Officer. During 10 years of working as an animal welfare advocate in China, I have developed a passion in raising awareness of animal welfare to the public and supporting captive animal facilities implementing higher animal welfare practices’.
Lisa has organised public events to communicate animal welfare knowledge with the public and facilitated different international workshops to build capacities of veterinarians, animal carers and academia in China. She currently works for an international consulting company to support conventional egg farmers to convert to cage-free systems in Asia. Before the role of consultant, she worked as the China Researcher Officer at Compassion in World Farming, a leading global farm animal welfare organisation.
Lisa engaged with various stakeholders in the livestock industry with technical expertise to help them improve their farming practices and achieve higher animal welfare standards, with a focus on poultry and pigs. Lisa’s experience of working with stakeholders in the animal- related industries sparked her interest in studying human behaviour change and driving farmers to change to higher welfare practice.
We are excited to have Lisa in the team, and to be able to apply her considerable skill set to improving the welfare of poultry in China.
